Recent image technologies are researching methods for realizing a three-dimensional (3D) image in order to represent more realistic image information. Using human visual characteristics, a method for projecting a left-view image and a right-view image to corresponding locations in a conventional display apparatus, producing an image by dividing the left view and the right view to a left eye and a right eye of a user, and thus providing 3D effect is acknowledged with its possibility in several aspects. For example, a portable terminal, such as stereoscopic mobile phone, a stereoscopic camera, and a stereoscopic camcorder, including a barrier Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) and a 3D TV can play stereoscopic contents and provide more realistic images to the user.
With a stereovision technique, the portable terminal obtains a stereoscopic image for the user by combining two images captured by two camera modules, and compresses the stereoscopic image mostly using a simulcast scheme, a compatible scheme, and a joint scheme.
Using the simulcast scheme, the portable terminal separates and encodes a first image and a second image forming the stereoscopic image.
Using the compatible scheme, the portable terminal encodes the first image of the stereoscopic image with a two-dimensional image compression technique. Next, the portable terminal encodes the second image of the stereoscopic image only with the correlation of the first image. As such, since the characteristics between the two images are not considered, compression performance is degraded and computation complexity is doubled.
The compatible scheme encodes the first image with a general codec and encodes the second image merely based on the correlation of the first image, and accordingly, it is difficult to determine the correlation between the two images.
Lastly, the joint scheme, which combines the simulcast scheme and the compatible scheme, encodes the first image of the stereoscopic image using the two-dimensional image compression technique. Next, the portable terminal encodes the second image using the first image according to the image characteristics of the second image of the stereoscopic image, or encodes the second image using the two-dimensional image compression technique separately from the first image. While the compression efficiency rises, the computational complexity is higher than the simulcast scheme.